CAN SUNDANCE MOVE ON FROM “IT GIRLS” TO “IT SCRIBES? Howard A. Rodman passes for the “it” scribe of Sundance’s opening days, as writer and co-producer on two debuts at Sundance, August, directed by Austin Chick (XX/XY, Sundance 2002), and Savage Grace, the welcome return of Tom Kalin to feature-making. Rodman is a screenwriter, Writers Guild activist, USC screenwriting teacher, and an artistic director of the Sundance Institute Screenwriting Labs, among other pursuits. His name has surfaced as the nom de brute of bad guys in Steven Soderbergh pictures, such as a lawyer in Traffic. When Rodman’s double-dip was announced, I dropped a line, teasing, “Type, type, Eh Mr. Kerouac,” to which he replied with an observation from Marx’s manuscripts, “At a certain point, changes in quantity become changes in quality.” A suitable citation, I suppose for a busy writer whose first original credit comes with August.
Premiere’s “10 Best Unproduced Screenplays” included Rodman’s F [PDF download via Wayback Machine]; his also-unproduced 1989 Daddy Empire is an unlikely lark, a pre-9/11 surrealist provocation about a young man whose oneiric misadventures in Manhattan include the belief that his father is a very tall, iconic building Skylines and clocks and fur-lined bathtubs sluicing the waterways beneath Manhattan ensue. (Here is a now-anachronistic musing as his Guy walks beneath the World Trade Center, “I began to think about the people who worked in the office buildings I’d been walking between. Their families. How they had been manufactured to become the kinds of people who could work in those kinds of buildings. I saw the office buildings sending out messages, by cable, underground, always underground. The messages said different things, but they said the same thing. We have these offices. Build us some people to fill them…. It would be easier just to take a job, an office job, in one of those large towers, my place in the grid, week in, week out. A place to live out my days. I was very tired.” August, which is set amid the dot-com detonation in the weeks before 9/11, makes judicious use of the iconography of the standing Towers, and the process-specific dialogue sounds keenly of the era, as well as sometimes gleaming with rhythmic eruptions like an emerald inside a toad. (Do note Rip Torn’s enunciation of the word “O-re-O.”) Rodman’s crisp 1999 novel, “Destiny Express,” one of the few ever blurbed by Thomas Pynchon—”daringly imagined, darkly romantic–a moral thriller”—charts the hours in 1933 as Fritz Lang plots his escape from Nazi Germany after Goebbels has asked him to run “a new program for the cinema.” While his two scripts at Sundance 2008, August and Savage Grace suggest a greater accessibility than these projects, do consider the gorgeous forebear, Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil, which Rodman cites as an influence on August. While little-seen, it remains one of the great tone poems of American urban striving.
PRIDE: Tell me how these two movies came to be and how much you’ve hung on during the process.
RODMAN: August started with me and some imaginary friends playing in my basement in 2000, was revised extensively in 2003-2004, when what was not quite current became interestingly period. It’s the first original screenplay of mine to be filmed, so I’m thrilled. I’m also an executive producer, with a financial as well as aesthetic stake in the film. August is a kind of free verse adaptation of my favorite film ever, Abe Polonsky’s Force of Evil, except instead of being set in the numbers racket, the brothers’ story is played out against the wild heyday of the dotcom bubble in lower Manhattan. I always like it when you can take a couple of characters with small differences, and watch those differences become large and larger as the world collapses around them. The pieces of the casting and financing took a long time to coalesce, but once they did, the production followed very quickly thereafter. Another very strong influence was The King of Marvin Gardens. Another brothers’ story, set against a world on the verge of collapse. I like Romulus and Remus stories—two brothers build a city. But mostly I like what comes after…
PRIDE: How did you happen upon Polonsky’s amazing work?
RODMAN: I fell in love with Body and Soul when I saw it at the Thalia [in Manhattan] soon after college, and then someone told me there was another film by the same guy, even better. It took a while to find it. I remember seeing it for the first time, if memory serves, at the Bleecker Street Cinema. Oh my. I’d grown up among leftists (Abe Polonsky was a family friend, and my father was one of Walter Bernstein’s fronts) but never knew they had, in McCabe’s phrase, “poetry in them.” So I was about 24 when I saw it. Great politics, to be sure; but even better as a dream poem.
PRIDE: And Savage Grace, for the no-longer-M.I.A. Tom Kalin?
RODMAN: Savage Grace was an adaptation I began slightly after I started in on what became August. But it was never an “assignment” in the cynical sense of that word. I wanted to realize the astonishing world that was chronicled in the book, and, far more, wanted to come through for Tom Kalin. He’s the most intensely collaborative director I’ve ever worked with, and I can’t count the number of drafts I did for him. The good and bad news is the same: I was in on the conference calls, discussed each piece of casting, was on the set in Barcelona, saw six or seven versions of rough cut. I’m an executive producer of this one as well. The financing fell apart several times and we commenced the film in Barcelona (doubling for New York, London, Paris, Cadaques, and Mallorca) on our third start date. Both films are personal projects and feel as such. It’s made it hard to go back to a more industrial model of the screenwriter’s involvement (or, to be more accurate, non-involvement).
PRIDE: While fact-checking, I discovered Amazon has four new and used copies of “Destiny Express” listed, starting at $51.74. [Just before posting, the figure had changed to six copies, starting at 68 cents.]
RODMAN: You can get “DXpress” for far less than that, my friend. Alibris has at least six copies at $1.99. Don’t be fooled into paying more for a first edition. There ain’t any other kind. [The novel was just republished in Italy as “Destino Espresso.”]
PRIDE: I know I’m one of the few people who’s read “Daddy Empire,” but after seeing Savage Grace with its period, cosmopolitan settings and August, there does seems to be a concerted fixation about cities and buildings and streets in your work.
RODMAN: As for buildings, all I can say is that I’ve been wandering urban streets, cityscapes, dwarfed by large buildings, all my life in my dreams. Mostly it’s New York, or a version of New York; but about once a month it’s Buenos Aires, a city to which I’ve never been. I think what I know about B.A. I know from Cortazar, Borges, Piazzolla, Happy Together and Apartment Zero. But somehow it seeped down into the brainpan where the dream set designers live.
PRIDE: Here’s something you said over at John August’s blog: ” My mother was a script supervisor, so I spent my childhood knowing, intimately and on a daily basis, just how many people it takes to make a film, and just how essential is each person’s contribution. For that reason if for no other, the phrase ‘a film by’ sets my teeth on edge.” Can you expand on that?
RODMAN: I don’t know if I could say it any better than I said it for John’s blog. Lautreamont famously said that “poetry must be made by all, not by one”; and films (pace, Mr. Brakhage) can’t be made by one. They’re at once intimate and social. Like lying on a couch and trying to catch the thin tendril of last night’s dream, only the couch is situated right next to the information booth at Grand Central Station.
Additional reading: Rodman’s “Authorship in the Digital Age,” a paper presented at the 2007 Rencontres Cinématographiques de Dijon, on the panel “Copyright and Droit d’Auteur in the Digital Age,” which ends with the citation, “As William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.” [Photograph © 2008 Ray Pride.]

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